It is surely the lack of a coherent, beautiful and easy-to-understand theory of endeavor that the left is missing.

Of course Badiou and Deleuze + Guattari articulate theories of subjectivity in relationship to an event. The trouble, and this point might seem ham-fisted or something, is that they're quite complicated conceptually (surely a necessity, since they are breaking new ground etc). And at the same time, more to the point, they lack a lot of the content that the most basic manuals for enterprise possess.

For example, Napoleon Hill's classic depression-era how-to-succeed manual Think and Grow Rich lays out thirteen steps, weaving in and out of the spiritual, social and practical realms, for how to conduct precisely what Badiou would call a "generic procedure".

Of course the terms he uses are anexact - he substantializes things no self-respecting continental philosopher would substantialize. And, even more obviously, he is explicitly complicit with the capitalist world-order (he says he learned these techniques from none other than Andrew Carnagie himself, and frequently invokes Henry Ford and Thomas Edison and so on).

But still, we shouldn't equivocate here: the militant subject of emancipatory politics/art/science is precisely what Think and Grow Rich addresses. And the fact that this subject is capable of having just as much "fidelity" to capitalist enterprise as it is to the communist vision is a fact that Badiou does not address honestly enough (at least as far as I know - and I asked him a question about it once at a lecture).

These techniques actually work, and the more faithfully you apply them, the better they work. We can suppose that the language that philosophers of emancipation use, especially when attempting to ground ethics and politics in difficult scientific subject matter, not only obscures things but actually leaves a lot unsaid.

The Deleuzean affirmation of chance is great, but he never adds that it won't work unless you repeat it aloud to yourself every morning for 40 days, for example.

And so we end up with an incredibly absurd, sad and ironic situation: Slavoj Zizek literally suggesting that Donald Trump himself might be the "master" needed to mobilize the left. Since no one who is actually on the left is applying the laws of success, our greatest hope is a figure on the right who, with his heroic gesture, might trigger a mobilization against him .